A few weeks ago, the Harvard School of Public Health invited Dorian Abbot, an anthropologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, to give a talk there on the topic of women’s participation in society. The invitation quickly garnered a lot of media attention, including a lengthy profile in The Washington Post.
The problem with the story? The story didn’t just focus on Abbot, and the efforts he has made over the years to study such issues as sex work, transgender identity, and the treatment of LGBTQ people. The story highlighted a speech Abbot gave last September at TEDxBoston, an educational event held at MIT, in which he articulated a new way to characterize trans people. In that speech, Abbot argued that “we now know that in the long history of men, women were neither men nor women,” and that trans people are “an entirely new gender.” The TEDxBoston website says that Abbot “dedicated the entire talk to melding biology and culture, sexuality and race, art and commerce, to better understand the complex views on who is female.”
The lack of recognition of Abbot’s role in the story is a double-edged sword. The attention on the TEDxBoston talk itself is very welcome, and should elevate Abbot’s visibility and support his work. But the lack of context, of explaining how he came to the views he does about trans people, gives his transphobia a veneer of legitimacy. People should note and criticise his ideas, but not presume that because they embrace them, everyone who shares them must be LGBTQ allies, not transphobic.
Abbot is by no means an advocate for transphobia. But the wall separating Abbot from non-trans people leaves himself without opponents to challenge him on his stance. When he received the TEDxBoston invitation, he noted the “lovely irony that my history of transphobia is now used to praise trans people.” Abbot, whose speech at TEDxBoston prompted some storming out of the auditorium after it ended, does not share every anti-trans position held by scientists. I do not see Abbot as any better or worse than other people who reject the science of sex. So how does he make the argument, that the scientific understanding of gender is changing, and that not everything we think about gender is “males and females”?
Abbot and other scientists take the view that trans people were historically a separate sex, and were not considered part of the existing trans population because “they did not align with the normative definitions of man and woman.” This is a notion of gender that is not only alien to how most people think about sex, but even more so to how most people think about gender formation and identity. Historically, men and women experienced and acted on their gender identities differently, and therefore different definitions of “male” and “female” were used by people with different views on gender. Abbot is now proposing that this definition of “man” and “woman” is similarly inadequate for trans people.
For Abbot, at least, the status quo is now over. He sees an opportunity for trans people to inhabit the “spaces” that trans women often occupy. According to Abbot, the new norm in society is now “gender non-conforming” (which he defined as having fluidity between gender expressions). This, he argues, does not mean trans people want to be non-conforming and “put a woman’s life on the line” in order to be more dominant socially. Rather, it simply means that “a man can stay at home” and not try to “be the home maker” that is a “default and function” of being “men.” Abbot values the option of not living as a “straight female.”
It is important that Abbot’s view of gender does not slide into a conversation about being trans-inclusive. But sometimes nuance can be lost in a system so self-enclosed that it pushes only one perspective. In his TEDxBoston talk, Abbot called for using time “to rediscover people’s strange differences and weird fantasies.” During that call, he ended up winning the crowd over and moving his audience along. When Dorian Abbot expresses a position, it is always surprising how difficult it is to move away from it. We’re lucky that TEDx is such a welcoming space.
